The Eastern Theological Trajectory
The Cappadocians
The writings of the Cappadocian Father St. Gregory of Nyssa illustrate the Eastern theological trajectory. In the mid-Fourth century, Gregory confronted a Neo-Arian theologian named Eunomius.1 Beyond holding that the Son could not be homoousios with the Father because being “generated” and “not generated” would make God compounded of two realities and not simple,2 Eunomius also asserted an extremely crass version of onto-theology.3 According to Eunomius, God was as knowable as any other being and therefore easily intellectually dissected, a point which he based his early criticism of Nicene doctrine upon.4 This was also backed up with a strongly univocal conception of language.5
In response, Gregory noted that Eunomius was engaged in a category confusion. Being ingenerate and generate was not a property of the divine substance, but rather the persons within the common substance of divinity.6 The divine substance and the divine persons were two distinct, yet related realities. The personal relations within God spoke of the “howness” of God and were knowable from the common actions of the persons of the Trinity in the economy of salvation.
Nevertheless, contrary to the claims of Eunomius, the “whatness” of God in the form of the divine substance was unknowable, in this life or even the next.7 Hence, it was not part of the system of being, and it was not therefore subject to Eunomius’s logic chopping. In keeping with this view of the divine essence, Gregory of Nyssa composed a mystical text entitled The Life of Moses.
In this work, Moses’ ascension into the darkness of Sinai in Exodus 21 becomes a metaphor for Christian existence. Spiritual progress means an ever-increasing movement into the luminous darkness of the divine life.8 In this, Gregory rejects the notion that the soul is capable of ever spiritually beholding the divine essence, and therefore categorically denies what Western theologians have typically called the “beatific vision” (visio beatifica).9
Continue reading “The Faithfulness of East and West: Post-Nicaea Rejection of Onto-Theology Part 2”